Broccoli tart

Well, ever since my friend Bling Bling posted her vegetable quiche on her blog, I was craving one.

Broccoli became my victim one fine evening, and I also like hers threw it in a nicely seedy-grainy crust, using flax seeds, sesame, ground soybeans, ww flour, salt, garlic and onion powder and some paprika and olive oil.. And filled it with some steamed broccoli, onions, and a pepper-seasoned egg-cream mix for filling.

Craving satisfied.
Would definitely do it again.

Many Merengues

:) Just some fun pictures of merengue cookies... when I was in Oregon, had many leftover eggwhites from making another dish, so of course made my favorite cookie... in abundance. Besides chocolate and vanilla, tried a new flavor having just bought lemon extract for my dad-- Lemon merengue cookies. That ended up being his and his girlfriend's favorite flavor.

The general recipe (in more scaled-down quantities!) :

Preheat oven to a low 275F or about 140 C
2 large eggwhites
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
3/4 c sugar (sometimes I push it down to 1/2 c, but then has a harder time getting as stiff when baking, so careful!)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Beat eggwhites and cream of tartar till stiff peaks, then slooowwwwly add sugar while beating, till very stiff peaks. then add vanilla.

.... THEN...
a) if Vanilla --> leave as is (or add a tad more vanilla flavoring)
b) if Chocolate --> add about 1-2 Tbsp cocoa powder
c) if Lemon --> add about 1 tsp lemon extract
d) if hazelnut --> add ground hazelnuts
... the possibilites are endless!

squirt out the cookies from a pastry tube (or if you don't have one, take a ziplock plastic bag, put the merengue inside, and cut off a small corner to pipe it out).. onto a lined cookie sheet (lined with wax paper or parchment paper)
Bake for about 20-25 (or 30 if you made big dollops), until merengus are crisp (on the vanilla ones, until the peaks just start a golden brown of lightly roasted marshmellows color.... mmm)

Last Zurich meal in January

...night before heading to my roundabout US visit, decided to finally bust out the frozen scallops I had bought, for a seared-scallop red-wine-viniagrette salad, with sweet-potato pancakes on the side. :)
Salad was pretty simple--mixed greens, sauteed onions, seared and lightly seasoned the scallops. And a reduced red wine, with a bit of sugar, salt, vinegar and oil. I really love sweet potato pancakes though..or more like potato latkas.. 2 grated sweet potatos, 2 grated new potatos, 1-2 grated onions, and preferrably some chopped green onions, 2 eggs, a few heaping spoons of flour, salt, garlic powder, pepper, all well mixed and smashed together and tehn just press into patties and sear in teh skillet like pancakes. I had a few leftover potato cakes for on the plane.

And a marbled chocolate cake for dessert. :)Also a pretty easy do--first in one bowl beating 2 eggs, and then beating in a brick of low-fat cream cheese and some sugar, and a heaping spoon or two of flour (the white-layer). then in another bowl beating till fluffy 4 full eggs in one bowl, add maybe a cup of sugar, pinch of salt, then mix in a bowl of 150g melted dark chocolate stirred with 1/3 c oil, and more cocoa powder if you want it more intensely chocolatey, and finally briefly stirring in ~1-1/4 c flour with 1.5 tsp baking powder into it, and pouring into a lined pan. Then from a medium altitude pouring in the white batter and giving it a brief swirl mixes it all through the chocolate layer in waves. Bake just till the very center comes out clean wiht a toothpick test. It's best when still moist and not even slightly overbaked..otherwise the edges start to dry out a bit too much wiht overcooking.. maybe I'd get a better overall moistness from edge to center if I used 2 smaller pans and didn't need to cook the one wide cake for like 50-65 min. I'll try that next time :)
Also I have to say in terms of my preferences, I really like the denser white cream-cheesy layer running through it, and I'd probably next time 1.5x or 2x that volume of the white batter.. mmmm probably would look prettier, too! as would a dark raspberry swirl to finish! oooooo
... I want to go bake something now....

Fresh Fruit Juice!

haha John's Christmas present is fun to play with....
It eats whole apples, celery, carrots... does a great job juicing the heck out of everything, and disposes the waste and excess fiber into a bin. Having fun making all sorts of fruit-veggie juice combos since then!

Starting off 2009 WAY too full!

Unfortunately just about all of the food on the table (and also the re-fill plate contents waiting in the kitchen) was eaten before midnight! ;) I still feel full today!
Some of the dishes:

-roasted turkey, sliced emmenteller on bread with raspberry-chili sauce
-carmelized onion tart bites
-chicken-(hot)dog rolls with gruyere
-artichoke shrimp dip
-mixed salad
-sweet potato latkas with green-onion creamsauce
From our guests:
-sticky rice
-traditional New Year's Japanese cooked veggie mix
-sweet red-bean roulade for dessert

yum!

Dinner Party Menu!

So during a boring synthetic chemistry seminar, constructed a menu for this party that I'll in my randomly-concocted terminology call "Modern American cuisine of French influence"...or something :P
In any case it was a lot of fun!

The courses were a salad with nusslisalat (couldn't find fresh enough baby spinach!), candied pecans, sliced crisp pear, and bleu cheese (it was a really soft variety, so i ended up needing to mash it into more crushed pecans in order to get it to "crumble" ), and a reduced white-wine viniagrette .... which was a dish I forgot to take a pic of :P

Then soup course:
Two-color bell pepper soup-- this time used red bell peppers and yellow... a recipe prevoiusly detailed in another blog entry :) This time exclusively used onions and bell peppers as the veggie ingredients, besides some white wine, boullion and olive oil. Also with a basil cream decor, and some pull-apart flax&sesame seed bread rolls for dipping

Main course:
Exotic mushroom (chantrelle, shitake, Oyster)-stuffed poppyseed crepes, with sides of cherry tomatos, rosemary polenta, and a vegetable gratin (inspired by seeing a great batch of Fennel in Migros the day before) consisting of pre-steemed potatos and fennel bulbs, then sliced and dipped into an herbed egg&cream-wash, and stacked with beetroot slices, with one middle and top thin slice of gruyere to melt-ooze out over the top and sides while baking to hold it together-- then baked at a low temp for another hour or so... (I really liked this flavor combo!!)
One thing I shouldn't hvae done with the mushroom-crepe-souffles is that at the last minute I decided that it'd be fun to throw in some red peppercorns into the mushroom mix (as I do love that flavor complemented with fish and other dishes..) and thought the sweet-spicey flavor of the corns would be good...but I turned out strongly disliking that flavor-pairing... after steaming in the oven, I found the flavor was quite distasteful from the peppercorns.... tasted good after picking those out though :P

Dessert course:
.... I totally abandoned ship on my creme brulee's... for reasons of not having enough cream on hand...and discovered that they just don't thicken replacing cream with skim milk even after an hour in the oven :D hahah.... BUT I did have enough 'side-dessert' dishes already planned for that, not to mention the lovely desserts that our guests brought, too! ;) But for the cremes I had wanted already to have some fruit complementing the creaminess of a creme brulee... so I just took out the creame brulee component, and left it as is with the tropical-fruit shish-kebabs, drizzled with dark chocolate and blackberry sauce and the merengue cookies on the side. They had a nice selection of pretty decent fresh tropical fruits at the grocery, so picked out some Kumquats, Mango, kiwis, and cape gooseberries (related to tomatillos....they look the same except are orange and sweet!)


I think for next time on the creme brulee's I'd experiment with still not using more high-fat cream content, but instead maybe add one more egg yolk to the proportions, or maybe one egg white, too, to help thicken it, without relying on the cream's heaviness for that.. Next time though! :)

Chocolate Tart

..... what I do most of the time when I have leftover pie dough from some other cooking project....
Chocolate tarts!


Filling:
melted 100g dark chocolate, add some sort of creamy something--this time 1/4-fat mascarpone, beat in 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and some sugar--adjusted to how sweet you want it and based on the chocolate sweetness...
Pour it in, bake until puffy all the way through--will make big cracks (like in pic below), then settles down w/in 3 min out of the oven :)